Do You Remember Your First Digital Camera?

[razerx]

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My first digital camera was the Canon G2. The shutter lag was so unbearable I quickly go rid of it and it scared me off digicams for many years until I got the Panny LX1 which it great. My first DSLR was the Canon D300 - was and still a great camera. My favorite digital camera of all times is the Leica M8. I just got a D700 and the iso performance is remarkable. I leave it on auto iso and it shoot and shoots at iso3200 with less grain than the LX1 at iso 400. Now I am looking at my cabinet full of M and R lenses and kept reminding myself how sorry I was for selling off my black vinyl for CD's some 25 yeas ago and still regret it to this day.

[xrogers]

Canon D30 in 2001. An excellent camera.

 

--clyde

[jwjensen356]

Mine was an Olympus C-2100UZ (affectionally referred to as an UZI). Design vintage is 2000, bought in 2002, sold in 2008. Great camera! Has become a 'cult' camera.

 

John

[Guest stnami]

Probably a scanner

[andit]

Canon D60. Still have it, still use it. The AF is awful and it's slow to start up and continuous mode speed is limited, but at low ISO (roughly the same ones as the M8) the files hold up amazingly well against my 5D.

 

Hi there DuquesneG,

 

My first digital slr was also the Canon D60. Just like you say, the AF is probably the worst that Canon ever built into any camera, and the image degrades at higher ISO's. But the sensor performs extremely well at low ISO settings. I still have my D60 and use it mainly for wildlife work. The images it produces keep up very easily with more modern cameras.

 

Best Regards

Andreas

[Bob Ross]

Probably a scanner

Good point, mine, too. I gave it up, because I never could find a polarizer to fit it and extension cords kept going up in price

Bob

[arpey]

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Purchased in 2004 ... still have it ... still use it ... it's been very reliable and, for me, was a good introduction to digital photography.

 

By current standards, it's a bit bulky and slow, but it still gets the job done when a "point and shoot" is what I need.

[FastFashnReloaded]

Hi Guys,

 

Here's a bit of an off topic post. Do you remember your very first digital camera? This may sound strange, but digital moved in with an astonishing speed. The first SLR that was widely available and almost affordable was the Canon D30 (with a 3.1 megapixel sensor - not to be mixed up with the current 30D) which was released in 2001. Prior to this, you only had digital compact camera's.

 

It was around 2000 that people actually sat up and started taking note of digital camera's. I was working with a Rollei SL66 Medium Format at the time and needed something with which I could do preview shots (the availability of Polaroid film for a Polaroid back was a huge problem here). The first digital camera that came out where you could go into a manual mode and set shutter speed and aperture yourself was the Nikon E880. The idea was to set shutter and aperture on the digital, take the shot, and then transfer these settings to the MF.

 

My first digital was the Nikon E880. It was an awful camera to use - Nikon could not have made the menu system and operation modes any more difficult. You had to charge the battery for 14 hours, and you got 40 to 60 shots on one charge... Mind you, at that stage the camera had a 3.1 megapixel sensor, which was cutting edge at that time. Looking at the images today though, that camera actually did very well.

 

Lets have some fun with this thread and bring back some memories of the recent past.

 

Andreas

 

I still have mine - a 2 MP Fuji point and shoot. It must be... About five years old now? Still works. Second one was a Sony DSC-V1, then I bought an Oly E-500, then a 330 and now a 510.

 

Fuji 2800Z

 

 

I realized that film was dead when I was happier with the results on a 2MP point and shoot than with a Contax G1.

 

 

[4season]

Apple QuickTake 100, purchased new in 1994 or 5. Very primitive fixed focus thing with only enough internal storage for 8 "high quality" 640x480 photos, which then had to be downloaded via serial connection to my Duo 230, which itself only had a 40 megabyte hard drive.

 

Mostly for grins, I later bought a Kodak DCS-200, which was a stock Nikon 8008s body mated to a Kodak digital back. No color LCD and no flash storage, just an internal 340 megabyte hard drive and a SCSI connector. The painful part was having to shut down your computer each time you wanted to connect to the camera. And IIRC, the camera did not show up on the desktop as another hard drive, but rather, you had to use Kodak's Photoshop plugin to view, adjust white balance, and download/convert the photos one at a time. No option to grab the camera raw files or do a batch conversion.

[robsteve]

My first digital was a Canon D2000, bought used in 2001 or so. It was Canon's first pro digital SLR. I used this with Canon Lenses and some of my Leica R lenses using a really early R to EOS adapter.

 

Robert

[fuchs]

First digicam: Nikon CoolPix 990 (1999). First DSLR, Nikon D1 (2001)

[KM-25]

In 1994, I helped Kodak, Nikon and AP get the NC2000 to the NC2000e, a bulky 1.3 MP DSLR with a N90s on top. When the battery ran out, the camera had to be plugged in. It cost the paper over $14,000 at the time. I mostly helped figure out the nasty overexposure with the flash.

 

I remember distinctly while photographing Bob Dole on his campaign trail having this happen at the worst possible time. Mary Ellen Mark saw my reaction and felt bad. She had an assistant with a 400B on a monopod helping her light images shot with a 500 C/M.

 

It would take some 9 years of using staff and pool equipment before I would actually feel that digital was worth the effort when I switched to Canon full frame and got my own gear. Lets just say I was SO happy when Nikon came out with full frame, Canon was never an ideal system for me.

 

Now I have three digital bodies and 8 film rigs. When I saw Mary this year, she remembered the Bob Dole battery incident. She looked surprised when I told her that digital was being phased back to part time in my career. In the coming years, I hope to only have one or two digital cameras and use them no more than 20% of the time.

 

Yes, digital has come a long way, but film has a long way to go in my hands.